Anti-war Propaganda: Back to the Future

The decolonization of Asia

by James J. Martin

Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain, and the War Against Japan, 1941-1945, by Christopher Thorne. Oxford University Press, 796 pp., $29.50.

Allies of a Kind is a book so expensive that it may be that only the British Museum may be able to afford to buy a copy. Its subtitle is quite deceptive; about 80 percent of this book has nothing to do with the Anglo-American war against Japan in the Pacific. Most of the book is concerned with the geopolitical realities involved from the start in the Pacific war. Much of this is well done and provides useful insights and observations. Christopher Thorne's primary concern is with the effect of the war on European colonialism and the long-range plans for Eastern Asia of the Anglo-American "allies" nations which increasingly collided more rudely with each day of the war. A side theme involves the attitudes, views, and actions of various Asiatic lands towards their future—a future independent of Occidental solicitude in their behalf.

Thorne frankly admits that the part played by Britain in the defeat of Japan was "a fairly small one," and that it was "largely an American war." His summary of the prewar period is not especially noteworthy, but he gets somewhat better as the war becomes a reality. In one instance of much interest to this reviewer, Thorne displays the stigmata of the conventional, establishment type despite his effort to appear as a moderate iconoclast. He dodges the Pearl Harbor story almost entirely, although he lists a single forthright revisionist book on the subject. By default. he accepts the fable of those whom Arthur Krock described as "the posse of apologists" who had managed to "explain away" the event, to the comfort and security of the Roosevelt regime. Only in his indignation over the acid remarks of Churchill's production minister, Oliver Lyttelton—who in mid-1944, in a speech, referred to American poses of innocence about precipitating hostilities in Hawaii as a "travesty" does Thorne explicitly reveal his attitude, essentially agreeing, with those whom Harry Elmer Barnes identified a quarter of a century ago as the "Blackout Boys."

Allies of a Kind is an account which rests primarily on previously published sources, although Thorne also derives lessons from sources which have lain unobservedprobably deliberately so by the establishment's chroniclers. Although he has included much interesting and absorbing gossip, gleaned from private papers and ocher manuscript sources, plus a number of interviews with those who were involved in the events, Thorne comes up with a set of conclusions which do not substantially alter the record. Those conclusions which deal with the realities of the diseased state of European colonialism, and with the ripeness of this plundered booty for usurpation by othersin this case the Japaneseor by locals through national revolts, once the war was underway, plus his reiteration of subdued assertions that the war in the Pacific was a "racist" conflict, will draw the most attention from the generation not even born when the Far East was breaking into flames, well before the United Staces became a formal belligerent.

This is a rather belated moment to expect anything startlingly new in a post mortem on the disastrous consequences of the Pacific phase of World War II to British colonial realities and imperial visions. This unmatched catastrophe was obvious to many even before it began to take solid shape after September 1939. This study more corroborates history than establishes it as an original conclusion, since so much of the documentation consists of wartime material, not subsequent revelations.

As early as December 1941, Member of Parliament Richard R. Stokes observed that Britain was already cast as America's Helgoland off the coast of Europe; the succession of British military and naval carastrophes experienced a bare ten weeks later similarly forecast an almost total eclipse in Asia. Gordon Lonsdale, the Soviet spy buried in the British intelligence service, remarked in his book, Spy, that the postwar settlement ot Europe was what World War II in the west was all about suggesting that what happened after 1945 was clearly visible as a main war objective to begin with, and which the war events simply ratified. The same thing can re said for the settlement which followed in Asia after 1945: Most of its dimensions were evident even before Pearl Harbor, no less foreshadowed by the situation in late 1944.

While H.L. Mencken once described Franklin Roosevelt's achievement in the Pacific war as amounting to towing ashore the corpse of the British Empire, Thorne repeatedly emphasizes the points that this is all FDR planned to do in the first place. He gives copious attention to the phobia of the Administration, from the top down, toward reestablishing any of the swamped colonial regimes in the Far East. This emphasis brings back to prominence a theme which was very much muffled in the closing two years of the war; one which, though exacerbated by the publication of Elliot Roosevelt's As He Saw It in 1946, substantially went into oblivion after the opening propaganda shots of the Cold War in the same year notably that of Winston Churchill, in his famous Fulton, Missouri, "iron curtain" bugle call for mobilization, which forecast the possibility of yet a new war for the "allies of a kind."

To describe the Chinese-lndian-British-American efforts on mainland Asia against the Japanese as feeble and pathetic is probably charitabie beyond expectation. One divines this with little difficulty in Thorne's devious prose and the record was open a generation before he started to write this book. The poisonous relations among the British, American, and Chinese commands are dwelt upon, and their joint inability to mount any offensive worth the name against Japanese forces on mainland East Asia until the very last months is examined from many angles.

The venomous hatred of the U.S. chief of the China-Burma-lndia Command (CBI), General Joseph Stilwell, for China's Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek (for whom Stilwell worked as chief of staff) has been documented with delight by a long string of anti-Chiang and pro-Mao American writers for four-and-one-half decades. Not so well known was Stilwell's hostility toward the British, his scathing opinion of Lord Mountbatten, and his designation of the letters S.E.A.C., Britain's South East Asia Command, as really meaning "Save England's Asian Colonies."

Thorne repeatedly lays open the serious shortcomings of Churchill as a strategist. The prime minister's tactics in the Pacific were supported only by his stubborn conviction tnat the British Empire's main way stations in India, Burma, Malaya, and East Asia were salvageable. He even advanced Qccidental cultural and racial arguments for returning them to British control. The full consequences of the revolution in Asian ideas, brought about by the stunning Japanese military and naval successes, never seem to have done more than graze Churchill's consciousness. But they made an impact, before war's end, on the America's number-two ranking Japanophobe ( H. L. Stimson was number one), Stanley Hornbeck, chief of the State Department's Far East desk. He was a long-time hard-liner favoring a confrontation with Japan long before Pearl Harbor, and a devotee of Chiang to such depth that well into the end phase of the Pacific War he saw no possible threat to Chiang's coming domination of China from Mao and the Chinese Reds. Few people in high places were so consistently wrong on so many counts as Hornbeck. But one must give him credit for suspecting well before the 1945 cease-fire that the defeat of Japan would turn out to be a futile achievement.

Sure to catch in the craw of some of Thorne's readers is his gentle, understanding, and warmly sympathetic portrayal of the Maoist sympathizer wing of the U.S. State Department, seeking ex post facto to establish the rectitude of their slant on the future of China. To be sure, they did not "lose" China, as conservative rhetoric characterized it: No one had China to award to anyone. The issue here is still the failure of the Roosevelt and Truman regimes to support Chiang with the necessaries to ensure his control of China, after the bales of flaming propaganda they presented to the American people asserting that the "saving" of China was responsible for the steps that led to American involvement in the Pacific war. In harmony with the bombast of 1938-46 one would have expected American administrations after that time to pour into China everything that was needed to prevent the land falling into the hands of the Reds. After all, this is precisely what was being done from 1947 on in Europe: Why not the identical program in Asia? Was this too logical or reasonable?

This failure of policy, and not the stealthy subterranean actions of pro-Maoist cheerleaders in diplomatic posts, undid Chiang's Chinese Nationalist cause. This writer cannot grant that these individuals were that significant in producing the neglect of Chiang. American administrations have been noteworthy on many occasions in their studied neglect of the State Deparunent over the decades and in doing exactly the opposite of recommendations from that center of often convoluted ignorance, which has often matched the contortions of the famous circus act of the last century, the Boneless Wonders. (Roosevelt utterly ignored State in the fateful Casablanca conference.)

Nevertheless, this writer could not summon the tears to devote to Thorne's trembling concern for the welfare of Messrs. John Paton Davies, John Carter Vincent, John Stewart Service, and other hearties who went down like clipped saplings in the years Joseph McCarthy and the dominant anticommunist sentiments generated by the Korean War set the tone of policy in the land. (The brigade who moan about "McCarthyism" and the awfulness of the "communist witch hunt" never seem to remember that there was a war going on during much of it all.)

One may also be Iess than amused by Thorne's veiled support for Philip Jaffe and the Amerasia Institute for Pacific Relations transmission belts. He repeats the standard line found in a stack of New Masses concerning Jaffe's edition of Chiang's book China's Destiny (and later Chinese Economic Theory) works which went into two hundred printings in their first year of existence alone, and which were read by or probably familiar to nearly every literate Chinese outside the Maoist orbit. What really got in Jaffe's line of vision was the promise bv Chiang in the former book of extended future war with the Maoist Reds. So he and others invented the simulated smokescreen of indignation over Chiang's anti-Western plans for the futurethe party line while Japan remained Mao's main obstacle. Once Japan had been defeated, the tactics switched from bewailing Chiang's anti-Western views to the total calumny of his regime, and the flooding of the United States with hysterical books denouncing him as the monster of the Far East. At the same time, they depicted Maoists as genial "agrarian reformers." (According to the Senate Judiciary Committee, these amiable Red reformers exterminated some 32,000,000 people while effecting their "reforms.")

One can hardly believe as sophisticated a writer as Thorne could produce Chapter 19, which deals with China. His delicate lateral arabesque, like a blindfolded man waltzing about among a lot of eggs, through all the Maoist journalists and ferocious anti-Chiang left-liberals and malicious administration functionaries, leaves one quite breathless with admiration. You are left with just enough staying power to appreciate the civilized, curried, sly undermining Thorne gleaned from the deathless views expressed in a generation-after-the-fact interview with Owen Lattimore. But whether or not the latter was a "conscious instrument" of Chinese communism, the mindless nightmare which the Roosevelt and Truman regimes called their "policy" toward China is still the main cause of the debacle. Their dream apparently was to wreck simultaneously Euro-American colonialism, Japan, and Chiang, leaving no remaining possibility but the 20th century's answer to Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, Mao Tse-tung.

One must give Thorne credit for assaying the trendy sort of racist commentary built upon the cliches of the last decade-plus, which has rejoiced in the most primitive manifestoes issued bv racial minorities, while simultaneously issuing horrendous interdicts upon the expresslon ot racist sentiments by majorities. This little game does not have much longer to go, but in any case, it was not necessary to tiptoe around this issue as it affected the Pacific War. Thorne cites the cultivated, stuffy, pro-Western racism of various Occidental leaders from Churchill on downa view in harmony with the world narcotic politics of the last dozen years or so, which finds only whites capable and guilty of racist views and sentiments. The anclent racial-superiority convictions of much of the nonwhite world find no expression as a moderating counterbalance.

Of course World War II in the Pacific was a race war. Norman Thomas in 1945 described it as an "organized race riot." Thorne might have cited some examples from the mountain of racist commentary written while the war and emotions were hot, by any of several dozen Western journalists, war correspondents, and politicians of all ranks. Less than a week after Pearl Harbor, American song writers had copyrights on 260 tunes, mainly with insulting titles such as "You're a Sap, Mr. Jap," and "We're Gonna Take a Fellow Who is Yellow, and Beat Him Red, White and Blue." Thorne might also have interviewed a goodly swatch of the men who actually fought the war, instead of confining himself to sterilized public documents citing, gun-shy and self-serving top politicos. He might have polled the former's sentiments, asking how often they had shot prisoners and bagged enemies who were swimming in the ocean after having been shot down from their planes and ships: he might have asked how often they knocked out the gold teeth of the dead, used their polished shin bones for letter openers and their skulls for ash trays.

And it should not be forgotten that the Japanese fought the war on just as racist a basis. The only problem for either side was the one facing the Anglo-American and Western colonial element, which had to soften the racial line because of their yellow-skinned allies in Chinafor whom, to listen to a major element of American Propaganda, at least, the war was being fought in the first place. (The ancient Chinese distaste for all white people as evil-smelling "barbarians" does not surface in this one-sided presentation of wartime racism.)

ln summary, Thorne wavers back and forth between presenting compassionately the view ot British Empire establishment spokesmen, who resented the steadily growing hostility from both official and public opinion figures in the United States toward the reestablishment of European colonialism in Asia, while supporting with equal warmth the view that the British and other colonies in East Asia were doomed even before the commencement of hostilities, and that their eclipse was desirable. Related to this is his favorable view of the spread of communism in China, and of other "national liberation" movements, combined with his dim realization that the Roosevelt regime and much of American public opinion were jointly laying the groundwork for the upcoming form of imperialismone not characterized by the soldier with fixed bayonet at the guard box in the foreign compound, but bv absentee control in the form of monetary and other material "foreign aid," and by the complex and intricate economic blackmail related to foreign trade. These were to be demonstrated to be far more effective in controlling the "natives" than any number of hussars.

Thus it is not to be wondered at that more than 30 years after the "victory" in the Pacific represented by this New Imperialism, that a book by the staff of Tokyo's most important newspaper, Asahi Shimbun, titled The Pacific Rivals, could go on for hundreds of pages without even having index mentions of "England," "Great Britain," "United Kingdom," or any other part of the lands of this former adversary, and include only two mentions of Churchill, both in postwar contexts relating to the Coid War.

One can introduce other speculative ruminations. The two-centuries-old impulse to resolve all of Asia and the Pacific into Euro-American colonies (only Thailand and Japan were not in 1941) terminated with the conversion at last of Japan into an American province under the proconsulship of General Douglas MacArthur. But as the corral gate opened to admit that last important wild stallion, all the others gradually escaped. The desultory efforts of the Occidental wranglers to get some of them back one way or another in the succeeding generation were futile.


It was once a classic but perhaps oversimplified definition of a colony as a region which served as a supplier of food and raw materials to its imperial "motherland," and as a market for the latter's manufactured goods. It would appear that with the decline in quality and the increase in price of many American manufactured products that a subtle return of the United States to its former colonial status, at least in part, is now going on, as evidenced by the steady increase in the importance of American agricultural products to European and Japanese markets (almost $12 billion worth last year), and by the increasing difficulty American manufactured products are encountering in entering these same markets. The erosion of the status which descended upon the United States at the conclusion of the two wars in 1945 is already far advanced, and the whole matter of neo-imperialist relations is now open for serious examination.

The new rules of imperialism make physical presence in the colony a no-no. Who will emerge as the imperial presence and who will undergo the status of the colony under the sophisticated conventions now prevailing in the commercial and monetary worlds has already been suggested by the events of the last decade. The situation promises to be even more convoluted in the time ahead.